Bob Bemer, who designed IBM's Stretch character set, says a July 6, 1961 meeting of IBM, SHARE and GUIDE chose the reverse slant so ALGOL's AND and OR could be typed as two characters each; DOS found it a new job 20 years later.
By Chris PirilloRead the story
Bob Bemer, who designed IBM's Stretch character set, says a July 6, 1961 meeting of IBM, SHARE and GUIDE chose the reverse slant so ALGOL's AND and OR could be typed as two characters each; DOS found it a new job 20 years later.
By Chris PirilloRead the story
On Applied Science, Ben Krasnow built a clear-resin Einstein-Szilard absorption fridge, heated by an alcohol burner and charged with perfluoropentane, and got it 5 degrees C below room temperature on its seventh version.
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Intel's Jim Kardach proposed Bluetooth as a placeholder named for a 10th-century Danish king. The founding companies voted for PAN instead, a search a week later killed it, nobody had cleared the backup, and the launch was about three weeks out.
By Chris PirilloRead the story
The Library of Congress added the Windows 95 chime to the National Recording Registry in 2025. Its essay recounts the agency brief, the Mac Eno wrote it on, the 80-plus miniatures he made, and the fee he pledged to Gaza aid 30 years later.
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BrickBoy's BrickStation swaps the left side tray of Lego's PlayStation set for one that holds a small computer, HDMI out, original memory card support and a speaker that fakes a disc spinning up. It's a prototype headed for Kickstarter.
By Chris PirilloRead the story
Eigen Labs' Darkbloom lets Mac owners sell their idle GPU time for AI inference through OpenRouter. As token prices fell, payouts did too, and an Eigen researcher told providers he doesn't expect them to recover soon.
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A fault in a system upgrade stopped all trading until 1:30 p.m., the exchange's worst disruption since 1999.
The revised DS cost 18,900 yen, added a 0.3-megapixel camera and an SD card slot, and dropped the Game Boy Advance slot. Its screens grew from 3 to 3.25 inches.
Google shut down iGoogle, its customizable homepage of widgets, about 18 months after announcing the date. That is a long goodbye for a page most people used to check the weather.
The announcement promised that "Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads."
1976: A supercomputer: 160 megaflops. Today: 2,735.82 petaflops. The Cray-1 peaked at 160 MFLOPS; LineShine, No. 1 on the June 2026 TOP500 list, peaks at 2,735.82 PFlop/s, which is 2,735,820,000,000 megaflops, or about 17 billion Cray-1s.
